The industry promised flying cars and consumers got tail fins. Today we are getting increasingly expensive smartphones which are better and better looking while ignoring real gains in productive utility.
I find it increasingly frustrating that I have spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on a tool that seems to get less and less useful.
I shouldn't need a computer anymore, just a place to plug in a smartphone so I can use a bigger screen and keyboard if I choose.
Also, the local golf course didn't like it either because of flooding concerns. Slashdot idiots think that building a massive data center will have no ecological impact on the area because Apple says it is "green".
Looks like it was basically a Town forest surrounded by farmland with some patchy clearing for local wood harvesting. I would have been just as opposed to industrializing a rural and natural area like that. Should be a nature preserve not an FU mega landscape ruining data center.
My guess is what you describe only really works with an Altered Carbon type of device to store brain contents and transfer it to a new brain.
I'd guess that the surgical complexity to actually move a physical brain between skulls makes it necessary to treat the brain's contents separately from its physical entity.
I think you have the notion of complexity backwards. It seems far less complicated to try and connect 31 nerve bundles in the spine and optic nerves than to map out an entire living human brain and try to make a working copy of it. The brain is very very complex. 125 trillion synapses in the cerebral cortex alone and the brain is constantly changing.
If we can ever get to the point we can repair spinal cord injuries, then we can do brain to body transplants. Somehow mapping the human brain to make an exact working copy might be mathematically impossible. And even if it were possible then it still would just be a copy made over some finite period of time.
Of course the ethical point of this is serious. Even if you could achieve human brain transplant. I mean,,,,,,the other host,,,,is or was someone else,,,how do you cope with that, the family sees their love ones walking and talking but with someone else's brain, brings me to Altered Carbon sci-fi series.
Kind of really scary
Kinda really scary... but... if we can achieve some sort of economically viable cloning/body growing technology. So say growing a new body costs about the same or less than buying a new car so most people can afford it, then I think that could be on balance a good thing for society and especially for individuals whose bodies become permanently disabled well before "their time".
I think some aspect of Altered Carbon's view of a potential future are terrifying, especially if the ability to restore life in its fullest is reserved for the wealthy and a token few. We don't want to create a vampire class where the wealthy maintain their wealth and power over others simply by refusing to die while others remain poor simply because they don't live long enough to accumulate relative wealth.
If economically viable for a great number of people, then the ability to live another lifetime in a younger healthier body could really improve our existence in a variety of ways and people would always retain the option to just to live out their existing natural lifespan and be done with it.
In some scenarios it could make overpopulation worse, but society needs to adapt to the lower death rates we have already achieved with modern medicine regardless of any radical life extension that would be measured as a couple hundred years. Just random accidents and degradation of the brain itself will still cause attrition, unlike in the fictional Altered Carbon universe where it is a lot harder to die and the biological limitations of the brain are circumvented with a literary device.
Speaking for myself, I think I could go for another couple rounds of a healthy youthful life.
Never has a Slashdot article title made me feel so old...
Old school. 1.0... forget it, I downloaded an alpha/beta version of Mosaic on my Mac around September 1993 right when I got back to school and moved into my dorm. And I remember that memory issue... that they fixed in October. Heck I might have even emailed them about the bug. But my own memory is getting a bit fuzzy 'cause that was a quarter century ago.
The party primaries are in every way public elections. If you want to claim to be just some private club then go have a caucus or pay for the primaries yourself.
And more importantly Democratic Party got caught red handed by our Russian hackers conspiring to rig the primaries.
Time to stop publicly funding the partisan primary system. We shouldn't be publicly subsidizing secret cabals of rich well connected people conspiring to get "their people" into our government.
Building services into the fabric of cell carriers makes everything less transparent and portable, and opens opportunities for them to play hanky-panky with pricing and restrictions. In my view, carriers should accept a role as a dumb-pipe wireless Internet service, and services should be platform agnostic.
Could we just come up with a messaging standard that everyone can agree to? Get Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft all to agree on a set of protocols and standards. The same way that a Gmail user can email and Office 365 user, a user of Apple Messages should be able to message a Facebook user. Why is that so hard?
As far as I can tell, it's not. It's just that all these companies all want their own little walled gardens so that they can abuse their customers, or else are suffering from Not-Invented-Here syndrome.
I agree completely with this. I think the problem has been the addressing not the actual messaging protocols. Meaning we have email addresses @gmail.com @icloud.com @microsoft.com which are interoperable and addressable across Internet providers and then we have phone numbers which are interoperable and addressable across phone networks.
Universal addressability is the challenge, otherwise how do you send a message to someone?
I would much prefer to see communication standards based on existing email addresses rather than phone numbers.
We should build on the email standards so people can send messaging requests or video requests or other forms of communications requests to someone@domain.com and the server passes on the request based on the protocol. And if the server handling messages for @domain doesn't understand the protocol, then it should just ignore the message.
No need to reinvent the wheel, just need to reinvent email without breaking basic email. Far better than trying to reinvent SMS just for phones.
As a reaction to the OLPC we got netbooks as an answer from conventional manufacturers. Yes netbooks were crappy but they still put a constant pressure on OEMs to make cheaper notebooks and lowered all prices for consumer mobile computers. The OLPC project itself failed in its goals, but it helped bring us the low cost computing things like Raspberry type SBCs, chromebooks, sub 100$ tablets and phones we have today.
In the history of computing OLPC was a bit like how xerox palo alto research center (PARC) pushed the envelope of user interface design and inspired the first Apple Computer Macintosh and changed the world even though PARC didn't itself come out with those products.
I wouldn't diminish the ball that OLPC got rolling even if it failed to gain significant traction as its own enterprise. Schools and school children all over the world are increasingly getting access to usable sub $200 laptops and connected tablets that are giving them unprecedented access to knowledge like never before in the history of the world.
There is certainly still work to do to make sure that more people all over the world can freely share in knowledge.
In Sweden, all of your earnings/losses (selling units of stock, mutual funds, interest on bank accounts/loans, wages, etc) are reported directly to our version of the IRS by your employer and banks. At the end of the year, you login and accept taxes. Most deductions that you would think you would need to input yourself are also reported directly (such as hiring an electrician or painter to work on your house). Some additional deductions you may input yourself (for example if you cannot use public transport and need expensive travel to work or if you sold a house), but everything is then automatically calculated.
Yes the US requires all that reporting too so they know what people make and what they should be taxed and could easily do the same thing... provide a simple to use website to confirm your income was recorded properly and to request some deductions... but they don't. We in the US can't even file online except by using third party paid websites or a free third party website which merely puts the existing forms online and isn't that user friendly.
In my state of Massachusetts a few years ago they actually took down the very easy to use website that allowed you to file your taxes free online and replaced it with links to the third party tax preparers which charge a fee.
Governments should have their own review and testing processes, which involve both code audits (in the case of neural nets, audits of the net core and how the nets are trained) and real-world testing of simulated hazard scenarios.
Government already has a test for driver readiness. It involves a guy in the passenger seat telling a teenage kid to perform some simple maneuvers on some side street while following the rules of the road and making notes on a notepad while nodding or shaking his head... then hopefully that kid only gets into a few accidents before he or she actually learns how to drive. And re-certifications require showing up to prove you are still alive.
I think before you start idealizing human drivers and raising the bar impossibly high you should have a proper control group of human drivers to compare against. Because right now it appears to me that human drivers are not a heck of a lot better than a brick glued to the gas peddle and rope tied on the steering wheel.
Testing is also done (or should be done) in controlled environments until you get way past the alfa and beta stages. Putting the autonomous car on the road can be justified when the car doesn't need human supervision and it can deal with normal traffic conditions in day and night with the same performance as that of a human driver. I seriously have no idea why autonomous cars in pre-alfa stage are on the roads.
Unfortunately most people are treating autonomous cars as software. And we know how software engineers think. Throw the alfa software to the public and fix mistakes afterwards. Oh and we're not responsabile for anything the software might do that brings down your house, empties your bank account etc....
Speaking of testing in a controlled environment. Run that video in front of 100 human drivers in a simulator with some variable amount of the video taken in the few minutes before hand with a control group that cuts out a few seconds before the collision and see if they can react in time to avoid the collision. I would be willing to bet that many won't be able to react in time to avoid that collision either.
To be realistic give a few of them a beer, make a few not get enough sleep the night before and choose a group of people representative of the old, the young and people with poor driving records as well as your perfect drivers without a collision or speeding ticket.
Even the ideal driver expecting a collision would have had trouble with that one.
We have to decentralize. Put the power in so many hands that no one would even dream they could stop anything.
Yes. The funny thing about clouds is that they tend to form one bigger and bigger cloud until they become sometimes destructive storms and then fall apart under their own weight.
Don't be silly. "Having a meaningful conversation" here means he gets to set ("help shape") the rules.
Rules mean, to a large company, a couple extra warm bodies in the compliance department. Changing the rules means greasing the wheels, for which they have the means. For a small company those same rules might well mean that the whole thing becomes a non-starter. So rules keep the competition out. So of course he isn't opposed to rules. He's got the means to make them work for him.
Yes, there is very little barrier to entry for Facebook competitors. If anything the software and hardware are easier to set up today than they were 15 years ago. The only issue is getting your friends to try something new and younger people are doing that all the time so you could see attrition away from Facebook.
Having more regulations would raise the cost of compliance and give Facebook a way to stomp out competition either before it gets started or as it gets big enough to be slowed down by regulators and the cost of compliance.
.... is the motto of Google's corporate code of conduct, first introduced around 2000....
Google enables evil already in its search functionality. Just go ahead and Google "How to be evil"
Or would it be more evil to censor knowledge?
Image recognition isn't itself evil (even guns themselves are not evil). It is just technology that could be used for good or evil. What people do with technology can be and usually eventually will be evil in some instances.
In terms of the US government, I think it is very much a mixed bag of a history of good and evil. But I would say we are for the most part trying not to be evil... good intentions which sometimes gets us into even more trouble.
But relaxing the existing rules to allow competition would be DE-REGULATION! Nobody wants that, right? It's not like regulatory capture is often used to stifle competition by existing markets or anything.
"deregulation" is a meaningless buzz word which can distract from both the real important public interests being pursued with regulation and the real downsides that bad regulation can bring to the free market without meeting those legitimate public interest goals.
I look at it as either good regulation that promotes competition and lowers barriers to entry while efficiently ensuring some public interest in health, safety or ensuring a level playing field in the free market.
Or bad regulations that unnecessarily create inefficiencies and waste along with potential for government corruption while creating barriers to competition that would otherwise have benefited consumers and the public.
Good regulation tends to be more succinct, but bad regulation could actually be even less wordy... something like a regulation that gives a human being discretionary authority to regulate as they will can be very succinct. As-in "whatever he/she says goes", but it is still bad regulation that creates the likelihood of abuse, corruption and undermines the rule of law. So fewer lines of regulation isn't necessarily better, just often it tends to be.
Cities are centrally controlled and can just decide to stop growing in part through zoning restrictions.
States have no incentive to restrain growth, but the Federal government has an interest in spreading out growth to other major cities in all 50 states where infrastructure isn't as strained.
Seriously, provide cheap personal taxi service and of course it increases congestion. There are suddenly more ride-sharing cars on the road! Mass transit helps reduce congestion by removing cars from the road although it isn't as comfortable as a personal ride and cycling / running / walking also removes cars from the road. The real question is what happens if congestion gets so bad that Ride Sharing services get stuck in traffic as well. After all I've seen situations where walking is faster than dealing with a traffic jam.
Congestion is its own demand management. The real solution to congestion is for some cities to stop trying to grow and grow and grow. Not adding layers and layers of expensive transit and unsustainable infrastructure. Plenty of other cities have seen declines over the decades and would benefit greatly if the major successful cities took a break on the population growth.
Sure studies like these can maybe lead to squeezing more out of existing infrastructure. But it seems more like a cynical justification for introducing congestion pricing and privacy invasive all road tolling systems to merely keep the poorer people off the roads during certain times so the rich people aren't inconvenienced.
The best hack the aliens could possibly do is give us plans that LOOK like they'll create something we really want, like an interstellar warp drive, infinite clean energy or the like, but once turned on it actually blows up the planet.
Even better if it actually did nothing and humanity spent the next 200 years trying to get it to work. Seriously, the galaxy could be filled not with malicious conquering species, but with a bunch of pranksters who are going to haze us into the Galactic community. Hey guys that was a good one eh? And after 200 years... here are the real plans which work nothing like that.
there will still be deniers claiming a population of 7 billion humans had nothing to do with it
Over population is the problem. We need a more generous child tax credit in the US limited to 2 children and we need to reduce immigration to force other countries to deal with their overpopulation and we need nuclear power.
Slashdot Mirror
just late 1950's tail fins on cars.
The industry promised flying cars and consumers got tail fins. Today we are getting increasingly expensive smartphones which are better and better looking while ignoring real gains in productive utility.
I find it increasingly frustrating that I have spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on a tool that seems to get less and less useful.
I shouldn't need a computer anymore, just a place to plug in a smartphone so I can use a bigger screen and keyboard if I choose.
This is what they wanted to bulldoze
Also, the local golf course didn't like it either because of flooding concerns. Slashdot idiots think that building a massive data center will have no ecological impact on the area because Apple says it is "green".
Looks like it was basically a Town forest surrounded by farmland with some patchy clearing for local wood harvesting. I would have been just as opposed to industrializing a rural and natural area like that. Should be a nature preserve not an FU mega landscape ruining data center.
Yeah, I feel sorry for that small, rural town, missing out on about $1B for their economy, just because of two assholes.
I'm guessing they won't be welcome in any pubs there for a long time to come.....
Or you know, maybe companies should locate industrial scale facilities in cities.
Despite the misnomer a "server farm" is not actually a farm.
My guess is what you describe only really works with an Altered Carbon type of device to store brain contents and transfer it to a new brain.
I'd guess that the surgical complexity to actually move a physical brain between skulls makes it necessary to treat the brain's contents separately from its physical entity.
I think you have the notion of complexity backwards. It seems far less complicated to try and connect 31 nerve bundles in the spine and optic nerves than to map out an entire living human brain and try to make a working copy of it. The brain is very very complex. 125 trillion synapses in the cerebral cortex alone and the brain is constantly changing.
If we can ever get to the point we can repair spinal cord injuries, then we can do brain to body transplants. Somehow mapping the human brain to make an exact working copy might be mathematically impossible. And even if it were possible then it still would just be a copy made over some finite period of time.
Of course the ethical point of this is serious. Even if you could achieve human brain transplant. I mean,,,,,,the other host,,,,is or was someone else,,,how do you cope with that, the family sees their love ones walking and talking but with someone else's brain, brings me to Altered Carbon sci-fi series.
Kind of really scary
Kinda really scary... but... if we can achieve some sort of economically viable cloning/body growing technology. So say growing a new body costs about the same or less than buying a new car so most people can afford it, then I think that could be on balance a good thing for society and especially for individuals whose bodies become permanently disabled well before "their time".
I think some aspect of Altered Carbon's view of a potential future are terrifying, especially if the ability to restore life in its fullest is reserved for the wealthy and a token few. We don't want to create a vampire class where the wealthy maintain their wealth and power over others simply by refusing to die while others remain poor simply because they don't live long enough to accumulate relative wealth.
If economically viable for a great number of people, then the ability to live another lifetime in a younger healthier body could really improve our existence in a variety of ways and people would always retain the option to just to live out their existing natural lifespan and be done with it.
In some scenarios it could make overpopulation worse, but society needs to adapt to the lower death rates we have already achieved with modern medicine regardless of any radical life extension that would be measured as a couple hundred years. Just random accidents and degradation of the brain itself will still cause attrition, unlike in the fictional Altered Carbon universe where it is a lot harder to die and the biological limitations of the brain are circumvented with a literary device.
Speaking for myself, I think I could go for another couple rounds of a healthy youthful life.
Never has a Slashdot article title made me feel so old...
Old school. 1.0... forget it, I downloaded an alpha/beta version of Mosaic on my Mac around September 1993 right when I got back to school and moved into my dorm. And I remember that memory issue... that they fixed in October. Heck I might have even emailed them about the bug. But my own memory is getting a bit fuzzy 'cause that was a quarter century ago.
The party primaries are in every way public elections. If you want to claim to be just some private club then go have a caucus or pay for the primaries yourself.
And more importantly Democratic Party got caught red handed by our Russian hackers conspiring to rig the primaries.
Time to stop publicly funding the partisan primary system. We shouldn't be publicly subsidizing secret cabals of rich well connected people conspiring to get "their people" into our government.
Building services into the fabric of cell carriers makes everything less transparent and portable, and opens opportunities for them to play hanky-panky with pricing and restrictions. In my view, carriers should accept a role as a dumb-pipe wireless Internet service, and services should be platform agnostic.
Could we just come up with a messaging standard that everyone can agree to? Get Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft all to agree on a set of protocols and standards. The same way that a Gmail user can email and Office 365 user, a user of Apple Messages should be able to message a Facebook user. Why is that so hard?
As far as I can tell, it's not. It's just that all these companies all want their own little walled gardens so that they can abuse their customers, or else are suffering from Not-Invented-Here syndrome.
I agree completely with this. I think the problem has been the addressing not the actual messaging protocols. Meaning we have email addresses @gmail.com @icloud.com @microsoft.com which are interoperable and addressable across Internet providers and then we have phone numbers which are interoperable and addressable across phone networks.
Universal addressability is the challenge, otherwise how do you send a message to someone?
I would much prefer to see communication standards based on existing email addresses rather than phone numbers.
We should build on the email standards so people can send messaging requests or video requests or other forms of communications requests to someone@domain.com and the server passes on the request based on the protocol. And if the server handling messages for @domain doesn't understand the protocol, then it should just ignore the message.
No need to reinvent the wheel, just need to reinvent email without breaking basic email. Far better than trying to reinvent SMS just for phones.
As a reaction to the OLPC we got netbooks as an answer from conventional manufacturers. Yes netbooks were crappy but they still put a constant pressure on OEMs to make cheaper notebooks and lowered all prices for consumer mobile computers.
The OLPC project itself failed in its goals, but it helped bring us the low cost computing things like Raspberry type SBCs, chromebooks, sub 100$ tablets and phones we have today.
In the history of computing OLPC was a bit like how xerox palo alto research center (PARC) pushed the envelope of user interface design and inspired the first Apple Computer Macintosh and changed the world even though PARC didn't itself come out with those products.
I wouldn't diminish the ball that OLPC got rolling even if it failed to gain significant traction as its own enterprise. Schools and school children all over the world are increasingly getting access to usable sub $200 laptops and connected tablets that are giving them unprecedented access to knowledge like never before in the history of the world.
There is certainly still work to do to make sure that more people all over the world can freely share in knowledge.
In Sweden, all of your earnings/losses (selling units of stock, mutual funds, interest on bank accounts/loans, wages, etc) are reported directly to our version of the IRS by your employer and banks. At the end of the year, you login and accept taxes. Most deductions that you would think you would need to input yourself are also reported directly (such as hiring an electrician or painter to work on your house). Some additional deductions you may input yourself (for example if you cannot use public transport and need expensive travel to work or if you sold a house), but everything is then automatically calculated.
Yes the US requires all that reporting too so they know what people make and what they should be taxed and could easily do the same thing... provide a simple to use website to confirm your income was recorded properly and to request some deductions... but they don't. We in the US can't even file online except by using third party paid websites or a free third party website which merely puts the existing forms online and isn't that user friendly.
In my state of Massachusetts a few years ago they actually took down the very easy to use website that allowed you to file your taxes free online and replaced it with links to the third party tax preparers which charge a fee.
.
Governments should have their own review and testing processes, which involve both code audits (in the case of neural nets, audits of the net core and how the nets are trained) and real-world testing of simulated hazard scenarios.
Government already has a test for driver readiness. It involves a guy in the passenger seat telling a teenage kid to perform some simple maneuvers on some side street while following the rules of the road and making notes on a notepad while nodding or shaking his head... then hopefully that kid only gets into a few accidents before he or she actually learns how to drive. And re-certifications require showing up to prove you are still alive.
I think before you start idealizing human drivers and raising the bar impossibly high you should have a proper control group of human drivers to compare against. Because right now it appears to me that human drivers are not a heck of a lot better than a brick glued to the gas peddle and rope tied on the steering wheel.
Testing is also done (or should be done) in controlled environments until you get way past the alfa and beta stages. Putting the autonomous car on the road can be justified when the car doesn't need human supervision and it can deal with normal traffic conditions in day and night with the same performance as that of a human driver.
I seriously have no idea why autonomous cars in pre-alfa stage are on the roads.
Unfortunately most people are treating autonomous cars as software. And we know how software engineers think. Throw the alfa software to the public and fix mistakes afterwards. Oh and we're not responsabile for anything the software might do that brings down your house, empties your bank account etc....
Speaking of testing in a controlled environment. Run that video in front of 100 human drivers in a simulator with some variable amount of the video taken in the few minutes before hand with a control group that cuts out a few seconds before the collision and see if they can react in time to avoid the collision. I would be willing to bet that many won't be able to react in time to avoid that collision either.
To be realistic give a few of them a beer, make a few not get enough sleep the night before and choose a group of people representative of the old, the young and people with poor driving records as well as your perfect drivers without a collision or speeding ticket.
Even the ideal driver expecting a collision would have had trouble with that one.
Google Culture...We have more and more people and less and less humanity.
Time also to change my default search engine from Google to something else even if it's not as good.
https://duckduckgo.com/
Works fine for me.
We have to decentralize. Put the power in so many hands that no one would even dream they could stop anything.
Yes. The funny thing about clouds is that they tend to form one bigger and bigger cloud until they become sometimes destructive storms and then fall apart under their own weight.
Don't be silly. "Having a meaningful conversation" here means he gets to set ("help shape") the rules.
Rules mean, to a large company, a couple extra warm bodies in the compliance department. Changing the rules means greasing the wheels, for which they have the means. For a small company those same rules might well mean that the whole thing becomes a non-starter. So rules keep the competition out. So of course he isn't opposed to rules. He's got the means to make them work for him.
Yes, there is very little barrier to entry for Facebook competitors. If anything the software and hardware are easier to set up today than they were 15 years ago. The only issue is getting your friends to try something new and younger people are doing that all the time so you could see attrition away from Facebook.
Having more regulations would raise the cost of compliance and give Facebook a way to stomp out competition either before it gets started or as it gets big enough to be slowed down by regulators and the cost of compliance.
How about Facebook stop performing psychological experiments on people for starters: https://www.theguardian.com/te...
Intentionally harming their users just to see if they can.
.... is the motto of Google's corporate code of conduct, first introduced around 2000. ...
Google enables evil already in its search functionality. Just go ahead and Google "How to be evil"
Or would it be more evil to censor knowledge?
Image recognition isn't itself evil (even guns themselves are not evil). It is just technology that could be used for good or evil. What people do with technology can be and usually eventually will be evil in some instances.
In terms of the US government, I think it is very much a mixed bag of a history of good and evil. But I would say we are for the most part trying not to be evil... good intentions which sometimes gets us into even more trouble.
But relaxing the existing rules to allow competition would be DE-REGULATION! Nobody wants that, right? It's not like regulatory capture is often used to stifle competition by existing markets or anything.
"deregulation" is a meaningless buzz word which can distract from both the real important public interests being pursued with regulation and the real downsides that bad regulation can bring to the free market without meeting those legitimate public interest goals.
I look at it as either good regulation that promotes competition and lowers barriers to entry while efficiently ensuring some public interest in health, safety or ensuring a level playing field in the free market.
Or bad regulations that unnecessarily create inefficiencies and waste along with potential for government corruption while creating barriers to competition that would otherwise have benefited consumers and the public.
Good regulation tends to be more succinct, but bad regulation could actually be even less wordy... something like a regulation that gives a human being discretionary authority to regulate as they will can be very succinct. As-in "whatever he/she says goes", but it is still bad regulation that creates the likelihood of abuse, corruption and undermines the rule of law. So fewer lines of regulation isn't necessarily better, just often it tends to be.
Devils in the details.
Spreading the wealth means less localized pressure on limited real estate.
Cities are centrally controlled and can just decide to stop growing in part through zoning restrictions.
States have no incentive to restrain growth, but the Federal government has an interest in spreading out growth to other major cities in all 50 states where infrastructure isn't as strained.
Seriously, provide cheap personal taxi service and of course it increases congestion. There are suddenly more ride-sharing cars on the road! Mass transit helps reduce congestion by removing cars from the road although it isn't as comfortable as a personal ride and cycling / running / walking also removes cars from the road. The real question is what happens if congestion gets so bad that Ride Sharing services get stuck in traffic as well. After all I've seen situations where walking is faster than dealing with a traffic jam.
Congestion is its own demand management. The real solution to congestion is for some cities to stop trying to grow and grow and grow. Not adding layers and layers of expensive transit and unsustainable infrastructure. Plenty of other cities have seen declines over the decades and would benefit greatly if the major successful cities took a break on the population growth.
Sure studies like these can maybe lead to squeezing more out of existing infrastructure. But it seems more like a cynical justification for introducing congestion pricing and privacy invasive all road tolling systems to merely keep the poorer people off the roads during certain times so the rich people aren't inconvenienced.
The best hack the aliens could possibly do is give us plans that LOOK like they'll create something we really want, like an interstellar warp drive, infinite clean energy or the like, but once turned on it actually blows up the planet.
Even better if it actually did nothing and humanity spent the next 200 years trying to get it to work. Seriously, the galaxy could be filled not with malicious conquering species, but with a bunch of pranksters who are going to haze us into the Galactic community. Hey guys that was a good one eh? And after 200 years... here are the real plans which work nothing like that.
there will still be deniers claiming a population of 7 billion humans had nothing to do with it
Over population is the problem. We need a more generous child tax credit in the US limited to 2 children and we need to reduce immigration to force other countries to deal with their overpopulation and we need nuclear power.